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I have a love-hate relationship with colder weather, but one thing for which my feelings are unequivocal is this: bean soup.

Well, not in the summer, of course.

But as fall rolls around, my fancy turns to huge pots of the fragrant stuff, and memories of some of the best I ever tasted, courtesy of the down-home cooking of my late Grandma Smith.

That woman could turn out a bean soup that would bring tears to your eyes, bean soup unlike any I've had since, the individual beans having disappeared into a thick, porridge-like consistency that Gramps and I would slurp by endless bowlfuls.

But my wife, thank goodness, makes a mean bean soup, too.

So it was that during a cool stretch a few weeks ago, after my buddy Sparky graced us with a ham bone during a luncheon engagement at the Doghouse in Mount Summit, Nan carried it home in a brown paper bag and set to work.

With my general air of incompetency extending to the kitchen, I fulfilled my sole obligation — staying the heck out of her way — by planting myself in a chair in the corner and watching her put this pot of bean soup together. Naturally it took a while, bean soup being one of those things it doesn't pay to rush.

But when, at last, it was ready, and the cornbread made, and the spoons, bowls and bottle of Frank's Hot Sauce laid out on the table, I tucked into some pretty good bean soup.

"Pretty good" because, as any bean soup connoisseur knows, it doesn't get great until it has rested in the pot in the fridge overnight. Next day's supper it came out, the leftover cornbread went into the micro, and I was happy as a pig in a wallow, which come to think of it, is pretty much how I sounded eating it.

The same held true over the next few days. I'd be like, "What's for supper tonight, snookums?" and Nan would be like, "Swiss steak and mashed potatoes, honeybunch," and I'd be like, "Oh," like somebody had just run over my puppy or something.